‘Yeah, you really fucked up.’
There was more lager so we drank it, lighting the rest of what was in the duffel bag. Smoke lines drifting above and around us, hypnotizing. The explosions were getting bigger. Looking back at the apartment complex, faces were at windows, adult, child, each illuminated with every burst. Smiles. This is me, I said to them, with a pint can raised in salutations. Thank you.
By the time the cops arrived, we were back inside. David went upstairs to watch
The Great Escape
. I stayed in the kitchen taking care of the mess there, eating while I put away the feast that had been left undented. The small British fridge was unprepared for such gluttony, and most of the food ended up piled on top of it rather than inside. When I was done and the dishes sat next to the sink in a dripping mound of tin and plastic, I went upstairs. David was passed out on the couch; he’d fallen asleep before the tape had rewound. It was hot in there, the open windows and balcony door idn’t seem to be helping. I took his wig off, and then went to his feet to pull the thick leather boots off of him as well. He could sleep the heavy of slapstick movies, but he woke while I was trying to sit him up, get that wool coat off of him.
‘My head hurts,’ David mumbled.
‘Sleep it off,’ I told him. When the coat was removed I laid it on the coffee table, headed for the bedroom. Fionna rolled over to face the wall when I came in. Her eyes were open and she was waiting for me to begin repentance. There was enough room in the bed that I could lie down without even touching her. Quietly, I leaned one knee on the mattress as I reached for a pillow, then closed the door behind me as I went to put it under David’s head.
Fi wanted a chandelier for the living room, cast iron, the kind you stick actual candles into when you lowered it down by its chain, and damn if she didn’t find it, only three hours after walking into that big warehouse at the edge of Camden Market. It should have taken months. I only agreed to it because I thought we’d never find one (the woman always knew exactly what she wanted, so much so she rarely found the thing that met her image), but there the bastard was, just like she’d described it in bed the morning before, and for a price that would have hurt in dollars let alone pounds.
‘Look, I’m just saying,’ I said as the cabby swerved before us, leaning into curves as he negotiated them, trying to get past meandering North London alleys to the Thames, ‘we could have waited. I can’t keep spending like this. I’ve got no savings left.’
‘I thought you wanted it,’ Fi whispered, staring down at the oversized cast iron spider in her lap. Of course I do, of course I do. It’s a nest we’re building and I love every straw. No, you don’t have to pay for it. No, I already paid for it, I got it. You’re being silly, you’re not even getting work right now. No, I didn’t mean that. You look great. The house looks great. I don’t need the money. I love it, really, I was just saying.
Victorious, Fionna leaned against me, my head gaining pain as the cab’s meter gained fare.
When we walked inside my flat the answerphone’s red eye was blinking. ‘Chris, it’s David. I’m going down to the brasserie. Stop by when you get in.’ I hit Erase but Fionna, coming in behind me, had already heard.
‘Oh come on, Chris. It’s Sunday. Can’t he leave you alone?’ But he sounded like crap, didn’t he?
‘He always sounds like shit, doesn’t he?’
He sat near the front, at a small table by the bar, a full pint before him. ‘That’s yours,’ David said, pointing at the glass, its small careful bubbles, its pale complexion.
‘Cider?’
‘Nice one. Big hand for the boy.’ David showed his palm to me like a TV Indian.
‘Where’s yours?’
‘That’s what I want to know.’ And he yelled over to the bar and one was brought to him. Twin beverages, both cold in hand, were raised so that they could clink together. ‘To the women,’ he said, before the glassy sound, and when the sides of our glasses had kissed he raised his glass slightly higher to the room before dropping it to his mouth. I looked around over my shoulder, but there was no one but us and the TV that remained on and muted behind me.
‘How’s your little lady, then?’ he asked.
‘Fi? Fine, really.’
‘How’s the whole living together part going?’
‘Well, fine actually. I mean, she’s not working right now, first the sprained ankle and then just a lack of work. She goes into the West End like every week for auditions, but nothing. I love it though. She’s always there. She feeds me. The house looks great, like a home. I haven’t been under a roof with a woman since my mom passed. It’s nice coming home knowing someone loves you.’
‘Isn’t it, though,’ David said, then drank again.
‘Yeah, but like, shit, just now, she’s got me coughing up mad cash for crap to decorate the house, right? So today I start in with the “maybe we should wait” line and the next thing you know I’m apologizing in the cab from Kensington High Street to Stockwell, you know? And it’s Sunday, too, and I know those damn cousins of hers are going to be coming by to eat my food.’
‘The Nigerians.’
‘Right. She cooks it and all, but who pays for it? I hate those bastards. They come over and talk in Yoruba the whole day. The only time they talk to me in English is when they’re asking me to pass something or telling slavery jokes. That shit ain’t funny.’ David started giggling though, staring past me. ‘Well, maybe a little funny,’ I admitted. He was still giggling, looking over my shoulder. I turned in my seat to see the TV again and there was a commercial, not a very good one. I turned back, ready to critique and complain, but now he was staring straight at me as if the cathode ray had never been invented.
‘She left me.’
It didn’t help to ask who. I asked when but he just shook his head not listening. I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ but David shook some more, then took the pint to his mouth and drained it. I was sitting before him saying, ‘Oh my God, man,’ and he handed me his empty glass, interrupted my ‘Jesus, I know you must be hurting—’ with ‘Fill her up for the boy, won’t you?’
When I came back, walking slow and staring at my hands till I reached the table, he was excited again, joyous even. ‘Look at that, Chris, look at that.’ Pints safely rested, I glanced at the television. Someone had turned it to an American sports show and there was Jordan, still young and in an away uniform the color of cinnamon candies.
‘That’s why I hired you,’ David said. ‘That right there.’ On the screen was the night after he returned from months of injuries, before the rings and most of the shoes, when he went to Boston and flew over Bird for sixty-four points. Ripping that tacky parquet floor up years before the demolition.
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning? Look at that! Don’t you even know what you are?’ He was drunk already, I was suddenly sure, because sometimes when he was drunk he could get mad in an instant, start yelling, even if he wasn’t really mad at all. He was already spilling his beer, too. I looked back at the TV, listening to him talk behind me.
‘Do you see that? Look at him flying up to the basket, legs pulled so far behind him they’re about to smack his bloody head. He’s got that tongue out, right? And that ball, it’s pulled all the way back, see? Like he’s going to have to force it through the net.’
‘Beautiful.’
‘You’re fucking right it’s beautiful. You’re fucking right. That’s why I hired you,’ he said, pointing up to the set. ‘Only you lot can do that. Anybody else, anybody else would never even think of it. Anybody else would be like “Two bloody points? Who gives a toss how you make ’em.” But you lot, you’re fucking mad, you make everything this frenzied scream. It’s the same with everything. Blues. Jazz. That’s you. That’s you, do you hear me?’ He grabbed my arm. I turned back from Michael to meet David’s eyes. Just glass there, yellow and brown glass; did he even see me?
‘Nobody could do jazz but you, who would think of that? John Coltrane could never be English. We just don’t think like that.’
‘It’s just an Africa thing.’
‘Fuck Africa,’ he was yelling again. ‘Fuck motherfucking Africa. Who the hell needs Africa? What the hell have they done lately? It was you lot that put Africa on the map. It’s about America, and it’s about you, nobody else. Fucking exploding oranges! Oranges shooting all over the place!’ David started laughing, spilling more beer.
‘You guys aren’t too bad. Reggae, that was y’all.’
‘Fuck reggae. One man, Bob Marley, and he was a fluke. The rest is shite. And Red Stripe is a piss beer, too,’ he added, giggling. ‘And I’m not even that, am I? I was born in Crystal Palace. Fucking Crystal Palace! There’s not even a palace there any more, you know that? You’d think they’d rebuild it or change the bloody name. Not even a decent football club. Chris, that’s the last thing I know that you don’t: nothing good comes out of this place, nothing has in years. This whole place is dead, it’s true. If it wasn’t for Margaret I’d be in New York. That’s a place. This place, you can smell the rot, can’t you? You love it, you think it’s lovely and you know I’m glad since I’ve needed you here, but the whole place is a corpse, innit? And me, I’m its fucking mascot. I’m decaying right along with it. That’s the only thing left I’m good for.’
‘David, you’re the man.’ I clasped him around the neck, trying to pull his spinal cord into sobriety. ‘You made me happen, cuz. I would have never got out of Philly on my own. I’d be nothing without you, I know that.’
‘No,’ he kept muttering, shaking his head violently and then becoming dizzy with the movement, eyes squinting the vertigo away. ‘Shit, why do you think I needed oranges?’
The lido, three hours later, pints and pints down the road. I went over the wall second this time, pushing David’s drunk ass first. We undressed over by the deep end, him at his leisurely pace and me frantic, just wanting to get it over with, get him home, into his bed and safely passed out. Pants, socks, shirts, drawers, I laid everything out neatly so I could get dressed as soon as possible.
‘Two minutes this time, you fat bastard,’ I told him.
‘Right. A minute or two. You got a match?’ he said, tripping on himself trying to get his socks off. I noticed the cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth, bouncing as he struggled.
‘Why the fags, man? Since when have you liked plain tobacco?’
‘She left a carton, didn’t she? I think I’m going to take it up.’
‘If you want to take up one of her habits, why not try reading some of her books?’
‘I did. But they were bloody awful, weren’t they?’
The water was cold, but still free, freeing. So much liquid in my stomach, in my blood, affecting my head, and now all around me. I touched the bottom, felt around in the darkness for change, and then rose to the top and did the backstroke all the way down to the kiddie end. Above me was orange-red sky, like someone had vegetable dyed the clouds (or cloud, since it was just one slab as usual). Wouldn’t that cloud make a great duvet? Hugging me like it seemed to hug this city all the time?
I hit the back wall with my knuckles, stopped floating and stood up, sat on the edge, and looked around. There were children’s things scattered about: yellow flotation devices, bathing caps with rubber flowers. When I had my child, this is where it would play, I knew. It would have David’s accent and call him uncle, come home from school in one of those green and plaid private school uniforms (or public school, or whatever). We would hang out at this pool, sober, all day, reading the paper and licking flakes. What better world than that can you imagine?
I didn’t know David was going to dive, never thought he would be mad enough to. Up in the air, hands over the head, sucking in that gut of his for once. Boop and then gone. Nothing to the water but a slight ripple in surface, quickly vanishing as it forgot itself. Nothing in the water at all.
I walked back to the other end, looking into the surface, trying to make out some brown within the gray. I started counting. 1, 2, 3, 4 … 27? 38? And then I started running, bare feet on stinging concrete, to where he went down. And there David was. He was waving up at me from underwater, big tube-steak arm moving in an exaggerated ‘Hi there!’ Was he smiling? It was hard to tell because the wind was blowing and the surface rippled, and sometimes he was there, sometimes he was gone. Sometimes David, sometimes just dark wet space, nothing. I stood, above him, watching him until he rose to the surface.
‘Ugh,’ I could almost feel the air pulling back into his lungs, his chest getting wider. ‘Wooh,’ he said, spitting and wiping his palm across his face.
‘What the hell were you doing down there?’
‘Sitting.’
‘Sitting and doing what?’
‘Listening,’ he said, looking straight to the sky and my sheet of cloud. Below him his arms and legs made circles.
‘There’s nothing to hear down there,’ I told him. David nodded, but didn’t say anything else, just looked down into the water.
Not a word. Not even after we’d gathered our clothes and dressed again, had climbed back up the wall and made it down once more. Out in the open emerald of Brockwell, David just started walking away from me, towards the direction of his home. From behind, I knew his shoulders should never look like that, a collapsed bow, his head disappearing into his chest until just a little bump of it remained. I yelled, ‘Big man, I’m going to talk to my jawn, tell her we’re going out of town, then I’m a come crash for a while, maybe a week or two!’ David lifted an arm slightly to tell me he’d heard me but kept going. I was too tired to chase after him.
Back at my flat my keys were Spanish cymbals, my feet those sticks that beat Japanese drums.
TOM TOM TOM
. Walking down the hall, up the stairs to the bedroom, knocking shit over like it was my job. Don’t stop, keep walking. And don’t wake Fi up, no no, because good moods were needed for me to escape and compensate for Margaret’s absence in the weeks to come. Sitting on the edge of the mattress I made it as far as no shirt, pants down to my ankles, shoes on. Then I started staring at Fionna’s ass. Goddamn, look at that baby, it looking at me. I started laughing because the white sheet was trying to contain it, but hell no. What was it going to do? One thin cotton membrane vs. Africa, yelling at the top of its lungs, ‘Whatchu got that can step to this?’ Nada damn thing. And wasn’t it lovely, she lovely? My house, my blessed house, lovely? The fat bastard, lovely? My world, lovely dovely. Yeah baby, my world. That’s right. I earned it. If it was a dead land, I was a happy fucking maggot.